In the rest of Chapter , we motivate the research of CIR by reviewing the studies on how people search, showing that information seeking can be cast in a framing of human-machine conversations. We then describe the properties of CIR, which led to the definition of a CIR system [1]} and a reference architecture (Figure REF ) which we will describe in detail in the rest of the book.
To provide the background for the discussions, we also review recent advances in conversational AI [2]}, and brief the early works in CIR [3]}.
